>> REDMOND CONCLAVE: While Mulally/Nadella remain the favorites, Bates is Silicon Valley's choice for Microsoft CEO, by Kara Swisher: "More than a dozen tech leaders in Silicon Valley, as well as several top Microsoft execs I have talked to over the last week, have a single choice to lead the company: Tony Bates. After decades of hostility, having the love of Silicon Valley, of course, is perhaps a little dicey for anyone from Microsoft, despite years of bridge-building done by many company execs, including the British-born Bates, the strategery guy. (But don't hold that against him!)" AllThingsD

>>>> Domino's tests drone pizza delivery CNN Money>> TAKE 2: Healthcare.gov is now working smoothly, White House says, by Elise Hu, Eyder Peralta: "The site is now working more than 90 percent of time, according to White House metrics, up from less than half the time in early November... 'The site is now stable and operating at its intended capacity with greatly improved performance,' Jeffrey Zients, the president's appointee to fix the site, said during a telephone conference with reporters on Sunday. The bottom line, said Zients, is that Healthcare.gov is 'night and day' from what it was at launch... the site will now support 800,000 consumer visits a day and 50,000 concurrent users on the site. 'There will be times with increased capacity [where] that's insufficient for peak demand,' Zients said. 'To prepare for that, we will deploy a new queuing system to allow consumers to request notifications on when to come back.'" NPR

>> CODING CONVERGENCE: An inside look at Stephen Wolfram's utterly new, insanely ambitious computational paradigm, by John Koetsier: "Included in the new project is natural language programming -- not that a program can be created exclusively with natural language, but that a developer can use some natural language. Also included is a new definition of literally anything in your application -- from code to images to results to inputs -- as being usable and malleable as a symbolic expression. There's a whole new level of automation and a completely divergent approach to building a programming language, away from the small, agile core with functionality pushed out to libraries and modules and toward a massive holistic thing which treats data and code as one. And there's a whole new focus on computation that knows more about the world than the programmer ever could." VentureBeat

>> BLACK MARKET TRASH: Silk Road competitor shuts down and another plans to go offline after claimed $6 million theft, by Andy Greenberg: "Sheep Marketplace, an anonymous online narcotics bazaar that received an influx of users after the shutdown of the popular drug-selling site Silk Road in October, went permanently offline over the weekend, claiming that it had been robbed of $6 million in bitcoins by one of its sellers who found a security vulnerability in the site. And Black Market Reloaded, the leading online black market after Silk Road, has responded by announcing a plan to go offline-perhaps only temporarily-and has already cut off registrations to new users." Forbes

>> SPY VS. GEEK: Techies vs. NSA: Encryption arms race escalates, by Martha Mendoza: "The new geek wars -- between tech industry programmers on the one side and government spooks, fraudsters, and hacktivists on the other -- may leave people's PCs and businesses' computer systems encrypted to the teeth but no better protected from hordes of savvy code crackers." AP

>> PENTAGON PIRATES: US Army settles unlicensed software claim for $50 million, by Jeremy Kirk: "The U.S. Army will pay Apptricity, a supply chain and financial software developer, $50 million to settle a copyright infringement claim that it used but didn't pay for thousands of copies of logistics management software... The Army was accused of not paying for 100 server and 9,000 device licenses... The company claimed its software worked 'so well that it went viral.'" PCWorld

>>>> Apptricity also managed to keep the Army as a client after the lawsuit DailyTech

>> SCUMWARE: YourFreeProxy is caught installing a toolbar that mines Bitcoin on the sly, by John Biggs: "Today in 'Things Your Tech Service Shouldn't Do' we present YourFreeProxy from Mutual Public AKA We Build Toolbars, LLC. The company, which offers proxy servers for routing around firewalls and censorship, has been secretly using its tool to mine Bitcoin using their customer's computer. This 'feature' even appears prominently in their terms of service." TechCrunch

>> SECURITY ALERT: Windows XP zero day gives attackers a way around Adobe Sandbox, by John E Dunn: "A new zero day flaw in Windows XP and Server 2003 is being exploited in the wild to bypass the sandbox on unpatched versions of Adobe Reader, security firm FireEye has reported. According to the firm's analysis, the vulnerability allows for a standard user running XP SP3 to elevate privileges to admin level, allowing a targeted attack on users running Reader versions 9.5.4, 10.1.6, 11.0.02 and before using a malicious PDF." [XP systems using the latest version of Adobe Reader, or systems with alternate PDF readers, aren't affected.] TechWorld

>> MS OS SCORECARD: Free upgrades pay off for Apple and Microsoft in November, by Ed Bott: "The latest NetMarketShare numbers on worldwide operating-system usage barely changed in November. Windows usage overall is essentially unchanged, with Windows 8.x and Windows 7 up slightly at the expense of the fading Vista and XP. Collectively, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 accounted for 9.3 percent of web usage in November, with XP still hovering above the 30 percent mark as the clock ticks closer to its end-of-support date." ZDNet

>> PETANERDS: Here comes a supercomputing app store, by Patrick Thibodeau: "The big problem facing supercomputing is that the firms that could benefit most from the technology, aren't using it... One possible solution: taking an HPC process and converting it into an app... This is how it might work: A manufacturer designing a part to reduce drag on an 18-wheel truck could upload a CAD file, plug in some parameters, hit start and let it use 128 cores of the Ohio Supercomputer Center's (OSC) 8,500 core system. The cost would likely be anywhere from $200 to $500 for a 6,000 CPU hour run, or about 48 hours, to simulate the process and package the results up in a report. Testing that 18-wheeler in a physical wind tunnel could cost as much $100,000." Computerworld

>> KOOL KIDS: As Twitter grows up, its users don't, by Peter Kafka: "If you have been on Twitter for a very long time, this may surprise you, since in the old days, Twitter was for old people, which made its early years different than most social networks'. But whatever. Now Twitter is enjoying a youth movement." AllThingsD

>> ON THE OTHER HAND: I'm changing my mind about Bitcoin, by Joe Weisenthal: "First of all, it's wrong to say that Bitcoin has no value. There's prima facie evidence that this is untrue. If you want to buy weed on the Internet, Bitcoin serves a useful purpose. First you convert your U.S. dollars into Bitcoin, which is a totally legal thing to do. With those Bitcoins you now have the ability to anonymously purchase anything you want on the Internet (like pot). The seller, the recipient of those bitcoins, can anonymously sell marijuana to you, and then convert those bitcoins back to U.S. dollars -- again a totally legal action." Business Insider